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It is about making games that are fun... and you can CERTAINLY do that within the confines of just about any machine. Remember the IBM XT? NES? Gameboy? Some of the best games I ever played had nothing but text, running on a 10mhz processor.

I totally agree but what really constitutes a fun game since a game that is fun for one person may not be fun to another. Ever played a game called Rogue now that was an addictive fun game dating form the very early 1980's. If you want you can still play it today in all its high resolution ASCII character graphics. What really made Rogue fun (again subjective) was that every time you played the game it played differently.

My dad used to bring a Compaq Luggable home from work so I could play Rogue with my mom. I have fond memories of sitting at the dining room table, or in the den, debating the various advantages of a particular spell and a particular monster-filled situation. It was the best ever. DOS 1.0a was the order of the day too, before MS was big.

Ahh, the memories.

At the risk of dating myself......

First system I learned to use was an IBM 360. It resided in my father's office (Data Programmer) and I remember keypunching my first program in basic on this machine. Playing music via paper tape on the rollers and of course we have tons of formfeed printouts... Still. The family always had a ton of confetti whenever we needed it. My Mom hated that. I went with my father for training on a weekend to IBM in Vermont to learn how to use the incredible IBM 370 series (It had a SCREEN!!!). Still used the keypunch cards as well though.

In 8th grade I worked on a Burroughs A10 machine. First time I had ever used a computer in an interactive manner. I could SEE the lines of code I was typing.

Teletypes were all over and I got a lot of time out of classes to fix those in the building.

In 9th grade the school I was in bought me (well, it was supposed to be a department purchase but I KNOW it was mine) a TRS 80 Model II with a 32kb expansion module 8 inch disks and a tape recorder. I found a way to alter the ROM on this machine about 3 weeks after they gave it to me. Always fun to remember the times I crashed that machine and had to go "fix" it during Social Studies class. Basically we had a faculty advisor and there were 4 of us that lived in the computer room. They had a collection of the 8kb machines in the room as well. For the Other People that used the lab to use.

I took a break to earn college money from Uncle Sam and when I returned to the world I bought myself a Zenith Z159 computer. Cutting Edge... State of the art.... 4044 chip with an 8088 daughtercard. DUAL 5.25 inch disks. Amber monitor (much better than the green ones). This little baby only cost me 3800 dollars (US). eventually I got a 1200 baud modem so I could program for college from home. It allowed me to connect to the Data General system our college had. Boy did I ever play a LOT of Rogue http://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html back then.

This trip down memory lane goes on.. maybe I'll save it for my book.

--Rogue--

I mean... this game spawned its own genre, was the first GUI D&D game [Even Baldur's Gate (#25) owes it homage], is still played at college campuses nationwide... and c'mon, /.'ers, it was even released open source by Guys at Berkley.

So let's hear it for the great-great-great-granddaddy of Neverwinter Nights, Pool of Radiance, and who knows what else.

Jini platform, Schmini platform. Ken Arnold helped develop Rogue, and if that's not a worthwhile contribution to the human race worth mentioning, I don't know what is.

First there was Rogue, then someone wrote Rogomatic. Then someone wrote a limited but cool-looking clone of Rogue called Diablo II, and someone wrote d2jsp. History repeats itself!

For those that don't know, nethack is an ASCII-based graphical RPG with movement controls inspired by vi.

To elaborate further, nethack is a latter-day version of hack, which in turn was a descendant of the original rogue . (Which, as the man said, is an ASCII/curses based RPG.)